Yesterday evening, walking into the progressive synagogue in North London for a Jewish community hustings, Zack Polanski knew that he would be the star of the show – but for all the wrong reasons. The room was packed with members of the Jewish community, there to hear from one of the most loathed figures in British politics.
The man who claimed he’s able to enlarge women’s breasts showed that his only real talent is managing to enrage a room within minutes, which he did repeatedly, effortlessly, and without using any hypnosis at all
The real competition in Holborn and St Pancras is between Polanski and Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali. She received a much warmer welcome on the night, with some appearing to back her simply as a strategic vote against Polanski. The other candidates, including the Conservative candidate Ewan Cameron – the only one to repeatedly push back against Polanski, including yelling ‘shame’ at him at one point – are not serious contenders for the seat.
For a brief moment, the hustings seemed like a very British north London event – constrained and civil. The candidates touched on the usual local grievances, from housing to crime. But everyone in the room knew what was coming. The conversation inevitably turned to the safety of Jews, rising anti-Semitism, and Israel’s right to exist. At this point, the man who claimed he’s able to enlarge women’s breasts showed that his only real talent is managing to enrage a room within minutes, which he did repeatedly, effortlessly, and without using any hypnosis at all.
Every time Polanski mentioned his Jewish heritage, it triggered laughter and mockery in the room. There’s something depressingly familiar about the invocation of Jewish identity immediately before Jews throw their own community under the bus to appease their party fringe. Our foreign minister called himself ‘a proud Jew’ just before announcing sanctions on West Bank settlements – for which he was praised by Hamas. Yesterday, Polanski referred to himself as a ‘gay Jewish man’ before going on to claim that Zionism is racist, that Israel commits genocide and that it is those (such as British Jews) who believe the genocide charge is anti-Semitic that are making British Jews less safe. This inversion, said to a community living under an active and acute terror threat, drew loud and furious objections from the audience. There were calls of ‘anti-Semite’ and ‘self-hating’.
While other candidates stated their support for a two-state solution, Polanski refused to give an answer, claiming that it’s not up to the ‘British government’ to decide a solution because ‘that’s how we got in this mess to begin with’ – except that no one asked him to decide, only to confirm if he supports it in principle. When asked whether he supports Israel’s right to exist, he gave a similarly non-committal answer.
Polanski did have a lot to say about Zionism, defining it entirely through the actions of one Israeli government in a way that bears no similarity to what Zionism actually is – the national movement for Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel.
Of course, Polanski also objected to the proscription of Palestine Action, shedding tears over the arrests of pensioners. Less was said about the activists who vandalised, threatened, intimidated, and targeted Jewish businesses with no connection to Israel, and physically attacked people, including breaking an officer’s back with a sledgehammer.
For someone who repeatedly insisted that international law must be upheld, he was remarkably comfortable presenting the ‘genocide’ smear as fact even though the International Court of Justice has yet to determine whether Israel has committed genocide. Here he was pre-judging an ongoing international legal process and thereby undermining the very rules-based international order he claims to support.
The most revealing part of the evening, however, wasn’t the uproar he caused in the room, but the fact that he expected it, and didn’t seem to care.
Polanski was not there to persuade the people sitting in front of him. He was performing for his party’s activist base, which has been tearing itself apart over everything from an impending ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion to trans rights. A party so chaotic, it has spent a fortune in legal fees over discrimination, suspensions and expulsions, with more internal turmoil guaranteed if its Zionism is Racism motion passes in its current form, which could amount to institutional discrimination against its Jewish members.
Polanski, a former hypnotist-turned-juggler, is desperately trying to keep all these balls in the air. He wants to keep his party united and stop the bleeding of voters to Labour, and to do so, he is using the oldest political trick in the book: making the Jews the problem.
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